Horst Cabal, invisible to all but the most perspicacious of cats or suspicious of dogs, watched them go by. Rendering himself imperceptible by men and animals was one of the little tricks that came with being less alive than most, along with his speed, strength, and — when need be — mesmerism. His perceptive eye and sympathetic heart, however, were all his own. He watched and he listened to their stilted conversation — his all statements, hers all prevarication — and he drew his conclusions.
He waited until they were out of sight before allowing himself to seep back into visibility, and stood quietly, an expression of speculative contemplation on his face. Then he blurred and the place was empty again.
Johannes Cabal was just finishing his first session as a sideshow barker when Horst found him. Horst sprang into being in full sight of several customers, who all performed simultaneous shocked jumps and squeals.
“My brother,” Cabal explained to them. He smiled with all the warmth of a dollhouse oven. “Rather a gifted magician.” He waited for the subdued and not entirely convinced crowd to dissipate before turning angrily to Horst. “What are you trying to do? It doesn’t take much to scare these sheep off.”
Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, its contents had survived the transit. “Drink this,” he said, unmoved by Cabal’s anger. “You need to save your voice for your next session.”
Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. There was a moment’s pause, just long enough for Cabal’s expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes. “Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?”
Horst’s surprise was replaced with mild amusement. “It’s root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?”
Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle. “People drink this?”
“Yes.”
“For non-medicinal reasons?”
“That’s right.”
Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. “They must be insane.” He carefully put the bottle down, but continued to watch it from the corner of his eye, as if fearing it might force itself upon him. “So — what have you been doing?”
“Watching.”
He said no more, waited for the silence to have its effect and for his brother to start almost visibly fuming, and then continued. “I think you may be in luck tonight.”
Cabal’s face showed a sudden light of hope that troubled Horst, but it was quickly replaced by suspicion. “I thought you didn’t approve.”
“I don’t. I didn’t say I was going to do anything to move things on. Just that you may be in luck tonight.”
Cabal considered. “And …”
Abruptly, he was alone. He let his breath out in a deep sigh. It hardly seemed worth becoming irritated, especially as he knew that was exactly why Horst had left in such a fashion. Johannes Cabal regarded the bottle of root beer and decided he would rather be somewhere else, too. If there was a chance that the carnival would claim its first real victim tonight, he was anxious to see it happen. If necessary, he would make it happen, and, given the agency by which he had come into temporary management of the carnival, this seemed a likely necessity. First, however, he would need somebody to take over the barking for the House of Medical Monstrosity.
“You.” He snapped his fingers and pointed peremptorily.
A passing ten-year-old boy with a Dr. Terwilliker beanie cap, a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and a paper bag full of freshly roasted peanuts gawped at Cabal. Uncertain, he tapped his chest. “Me, sir?”
“Yes, you. Here. Come here. Up here, behind this podium. No, perhaps not — nobody will see you there. To the side. Take that ridiculous hat off. Now put this ridiculous hat on. There. Now publicise this sideshow until I get back.”
Cabal left the boy panic-stricken in an overlarge straw boater. “How do I do that?” the boy called after him, but he received no answer.
In truth, however, Cabal was equally unsure of his next actions. Despite a careful search, the carnival had failed to produce anything as basic as a user’s manual.
Cabal wandered among the chattering common folk — who were both very chatty and very common — and sought inspiration. It shouldn’t be difficult, he reasoned. The whole carnival was an excrescence of Hell, an outpost, a departure lounge for the pre-damned. The whole place should hunger for the souls of the unwary. Therefore, he theorised, it should only require a light prodding to do what came naturally. He paused, a dark rock in a flow of humanity. He wasn’t quite sure as to how one should set about lightly prodding a carnival. Perhaps he was, abominable as the thought was, over-intellectualising the problem. Perhaps he should trust his instinct. This would be difficult, he knew — his first instinct was always to use rational thought — but perhaps, just this once, he should listen to his intuition.
He tried to clear his mind, tried to silence the thousand buzzing thoughts that made up his consciousness, tried to ignore the sound of the crowd. He concentrated and focussed until there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
Certainly nothing helpful. He made an exasperated noise and let his mind, resentful of even those few moments of inactivity, whirr back up to speed.
Prickly at the failed experiment, Johannes Cabal looked straight ahead and saw the carnival’s penny arcade. He’d expressed surprise when Horst had insisted on it being added to the complement of attractions, but — as always — his brother had known what people liked. While it was unlikely that it would ever play much of a role in gathering souls, it did seem to be doing an excellent job in gathering spare change from those who could afford it and redistributing it to those who were running short. The idea was that the sideshows were where the real chances lay; in the dark corners and shadowed booths, these were where the deals of dubious theological probity would be debated and decided. In contrast, the penny arcade was largely intended as a wealth-redistribution centre, it being notoriously difficult to lead folk into temptation if they can’t get past the ticket barrier. Mr. Bones had explained all this to Cabal while the arcade was being built by two of Horst’s more fanciful constructs, Messrs Lintel and Scree. They loped around like stilt walkers on overly long, overly thin legs, their equally long thin arms waving around. They wore black suits and dark glasses and had hair of an uncomfortable shade of yellow, and the thickness of darning wool. As he watched them totter back and forth barking at each other in an incomprehensible language of their own, Cabal had been confident that they were intended as gross parodies of himself, but refused to rise to the insult by saying as much. Still, they certainly knew their business, throwing together wood and metal, glass, paint, and varnish in a whirl of apparent chaos that spat out penny cascades, mechanical horse races, and bagatelles of precision engineering and pristine form. Cabal liked things to be precise and pristine, and so had warmed to Lintel and Scree, although, again, he wouldn’t say as much. This kind feeling came to him now as he looked at the penny arcade, the result of their labours. He would try his luck here.
The arcade was busy. At the one-armed bandits, a man was consistently losing while his less well-off neighbour was on a lucky streak, both unaware of the arcade’s Marxist tendencies. Elsewhere, tin monkeys shinned up tin palm trees, ghosts appeared at the windows of a haunted house only to be met by a fusillade of shots on a shooting gallery,[1] and a mechanical Gypsy told fortunes from the security of a glass-fronted case.
The Gypsy was — according to the legend painted across a board at the top of the case in swirling orange, yellow, and black — one Madame Destiny, and she took the form of a young woman with a headscarf, loop earrings, and a vertiginous cleavage. She sat, hands raised motionless about her crystal ball, silently waiting for the gang of teenaged boys gathered in front of her case to stop trying to peer down her top, making ribald and obvious comments as they did so. Finally, one of them, spurred on by the others, fumbled a coin into the slot. Madame Destiny immediately whirred into life and obligingly looked into her crystal ball. Deep within it, strange colours flickered and swirled. The boys grew quieter, and an air of discomfort developed around them as they watched the mechanical Gypsy’s hands move in a very realistic manner for wood or plaster, her fingers bending where no hinges were evident.
Abruptly she juddered to a halt, the light died within the crystal ball, and the boys recovered their bravado a little. Then, with a percussive twang of spring-loaded machinery that sang through the machine’s case for long
